Quel sens donner au Graphisme ethniQue ? - graphic design

orn in Europe, principles that were the product of the European experience, just doesn’t work. Why should the
sterile and bloodless corporate “Swiss” style work for a Mozambican designer whose existence and environment
will never mimic industrialized Europe? And why on earth should a designer from the Moslem-influenced Sudan
produce work that has nothing to do with his experience – struggling, unsuccessfully, to produce work that looks
“European”?
It is madness. But there we were, with the rest of my team of trainers: donning our western glasses and, like the
design elitists we’ve become, trashing these people’s work! I realized there and then that my mission here was not
to “teach” any skills. (I was supposed to teach computer skills. In three weeks? You gotta be kidding me!) Rather,
my duty was to introduce a new way of thinking about design, a new way of looking at the world around them – that
creation of a «new” visual language I was talking about earlier. To get them to tap into Afrika’s wealth of inspiration.
It hit me right then also, that we had to create a whole new design curriculum for Afrika! I remembered Paul
Rand’s insistance that there was only one way – the modernist approach to design – and anything other was garbage!
I also remembered him telling me that all I needed to do was “teach them” aesthetics and that it didn’t matter
where one was: “Good design is good design, irrespective of where you are.” At a time in history when young
western designers are rejecting Rand’s first contention, it’s high time Afrika joined them. I taught an “Experimental
Typography” class at Cooper Union in New York City in 1996, and I invited Elliot Earls, a digital type designer
and a “poststructuralist” graduate of Cranbrook, to speak to my class. His radical approach to typography shocked
my students, who were schooled in the modernist tradition. “Post-structuralism’s emphasis on the openness
of meaning has been incorporated by many designers into a romantic theory of self-expression: as the argument
goes, because signification is not fixed in material forms, designers and readers share in the spontaneous creation
of meaning. Interpretations are private and personal, generated by the unique sensibilities of makers and readers…
Rather than view the production of meaning as a private matter, post-structuralist theory tends to see the realm of
the ‘personal’ as structured by external signs. Invention and revolution result from tactical aggressions against the
grid.” (“Deconstruction and Graphic Design,” p. 9; in Lupton and Miller, Design Writing Research, Kiosk, New
York 1996.) Earls and other young renegade typographers made a huge impression on me; I realized that we are
kindred spirits. What they are doing dovetails with my ideas for Afrika. Graphic design cannot avoid the pluralism
of influence wrought by the globalization of the canon. My illustration of the ridiculousness of forcefeeding Africans
stale design principles is true for other “non-western”locales.
So I lectured, showed slides – my Cooper Union students’ work, the work of the new typographers, and pages from
my own book, called Afrikan Alphabets (a work in progress) – and stunned my audience! They were stunned not
because what I was saying was so far-fetched or difficult to swallow – they had never thought of things that way!
Graphic design was such a “foreign” thing that the idea of personalizing it had never crossed their minds. I gave
them two projects: each one had to design a typeface, and as a group, they made a book out of bark cloth (which
I call ”Afrikan paper”) about the process of making the medium. We wanted to create a truly Afrikan book, using
natural dyes and inks and some of the new fonts, but we only had ten days, so we opted for silkscreening the text
instead.
Since I’m fond of saying that Afrikans did not have shapes like squares or rectangles, I insisted that the text be
laid out in circles and other organic shapes, with each spread different. The results were stunningly simple and
amazingly effective. Varying style and structure in one unit is also prevalent in other Afrikan arts like music and
dance; just listen to mbira music, deceptively simple to the uninitiated ear but extremely complex in structure to the
trained musician. The Afrikan’s sense of color and rhythm is unique to the continent. Take for instance textile design.
It was a revelation to learn that in the Congo, where textile design is big, the seemingly “off register” printing
on “kitenge” cloth is intentional! That is how the market demands it. One looks at the graphic expression of the
deconstructivists where razor-sharp precision is thrown out of the window in favor of looser and more atmospheric
work and wonders why we are not encouraging our students to experiment with sensibilities that would come more
naturally to them. Take color for instance. Afrikans have their own palettes that have no kinship with the principles
of color devised by such schools of thought as the Bauhaus. Why do we ignore those? The rest of the world would
love to understand this Afrikan sense of color! Tapestries woven by “unschooled” craftspeople grace some of the
world’s major museums and private collections – stunning testimonials to the Afrikan creative genius. Rhythm
comes naturally to the Afrikan artist because of her proximity to nature in everyday life. I saw stunning rhythmic
patterns on baskets in Uganda and realized then that when we talk of rhythm in design today, we evoke the work of
people like Piet Mondrian, who was inspired by the jazz music of the Afrikan Amerikans who in turn brought that
stuff with them on their forced journey to the new world. Can you imagine the potency of design work that looks at
home for rhythmic inspiration!
We could go on and on with the analogies; the fact remains – Afrika is the source of it all. Let us go back to the
source. The western world is looking to Afrika again for inspiration. This time they won’t simply walk in and take
it (in fact, they don’t want to!) – rather, they will learn from us; there will be mutual respect for each other’s intellectual
and creative property. There will be an equal flow of information and knowledge from north to south and
vice-versa. That is the new order, and we are starting to create it now. ZIVA is only a small step in the right direction.
We need more people who care to join us and chart the way forward.
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